In the winter, he wore army combat boots instead of the sandals. He was using those boots now to stomp the little Puerto Rican pool hustler into the icy sidewalk. In the patrol car, the two cops debated whether they should get out and break this thing up before the little spic got his brains squashed all over the sidewalk. They were spared having to make any decision because their radio erupted with a 1010, and they radioed back that they were rolling on it. They pulled away from the curb just as Brother Anthony leaned over the prostrate and unconscious hustler to take his wallet from his pocket. Only $10 of the money in that wallet had been hustled from Brother Anthony, but he figured he might as well take all of it because of all the trouble the little punk had put him to. He was cleaning out the wallet when Emma came around the corner.
Emma was known in the neighborhood as the Fat Lady, and most of the people in the precinct tried to steer very clear of her because she was known to possess a short temper and a straight-edge razor. She carried the razor in her shoulder bag, hanging from the left shoulder, so that she could reach in there with her right hand, and whip open the razor in a flash, and lop off any dude’s ear, or slash his face or his hands, or sometimes go for the money, open the man’s windpipe and his jugular with one and the same stroke. Nobody liked to mess with the Fat Lady, which was perhaps why the crowd began to disperse the moment she came around the corner. On the other hand, the crowd might have dispersed anyway, now that the action had ended; nobody liked to stand around doing nothing on a cold day, especially in this neighborhood, where somehow it always seemed colder than anyplace else in the city. This neighborhood could have been Moscow. The park bordering this neighborhood could have been Gorky Park. Maybe it was. Or vice versa.
“Hello, bro,” the Fat Lady said.
“Hello, Emma,” he said, looking up from where he was crouched over the unconscious hustler. He had stomped the man real good. A thin trickle of blood was beginning to congeal on the ice beneath the stupid punk’s head. His face looked very blue. Brother Anthony tossed the empty wallet over his shoulder, stood up to his full height, and tucked the $500-odd into the pouchlike pocket at the front of the cassock. He began walking, and Emma fell into step beside him.
Emma was perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three years old, in any event a good six or seven years older than Brother Anthony. Her full name was Emma Forbes, which had been her name when she was still married to a black man named Jimmy Forbes, since deceased, the unfortunate victim of a shoot-out in a bank he’d been trying to hold up. The man who’d shot and killed Emma’s husband was a bank guard who’d been sixty-three years old at the time, a retired patrolman out of the 28th Precinct downtown. He’d never lived to be sixty-four because Emma sought him out a month after her husband’s funeral, and slit his throat from ear to ear one fine April night when the forsythias were just starting to bud. Emma did not like people who deprived her or her loved ones of anything they wanted or needed. Emma was fond of saying, “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” an expression she used to justify her frequent vengeful attacks. It was uncertain whether the expression had preceded the nickname, or vice versa. When someone was five feet six inches tall and weighed 170 pounds, it was reasonable to expect — especially in this neighborhood, where street names were as common as legal names — that sooner or later someone would begin calling her the Fat Lady, even without having heard her operatic reference.
Brother Anthony was one of the very few people who knew that the name on her mailbox was Emma Forbes, and that she had been born Emma Goldberg, not to be confused with the anarchist Emma Goldman, who’d been around long before Emma Goldberg was even born. Brother Anthony was also one of the very few people who called her Emma, the rest preferring to call her either Lady (not daring to use the adjective in her presence) or nothing at all, lest she suddenly take offense at an inflection and whip out that razor of hers. Brother Anthony was the only person in the precinct, and perhaps the entire world, who thought Emma Goldberg Forbes aka the Fat Lady was exceptionally beautiful and extraordinarily sexy besides.
“Listen, there’s no accounting for taste,” a former acquaintance once said to Brother Anthony immediately after he’d mentioned how beautiful and sexy he thought Emma was. The man’s thoughtless comment was uttered a moment before Brother Anthony plucked him off his stool and hurled him through the plate glass mirror behind the bar at which they’d been sitting. Brother Anthony did not like people who belittled the way he felt about Emma. Brother Anthony saw her quite differently than most people saw her. Most people saw a dumpy little bleached blonde in a black cloth coat and black cotton stockings and blue track shoes and a black shoulder bag in which there was a straightedge razor with a bone handle. Brother Anthony — despite empirical knowledge to the contrary — saw a natural blonde with curly ringlets that framed a Madonna-like face and beautiful blue eyes; Brother Anthony saw breasts like watermelons and a behind like a brewer’s horse; Brother Anthony saw thick white thighs and acres and acres of billowy flesh; Brother Anthony saw a shy, retiring, timid, vulnerable darling dumpling caught in the whirlwind of a hostile society, someone to cuddle and cherish and console.
Just walking beside her, Brother Anthony had an erection, but perhaps that was due to the supreme satisfaction of having beaten that pool hustler to within an inch of his life; it was sometimes difficult to separate and categorize emotions, especially when it was so cold outside. He took Emma’s elbow and led her onto Mason Avenue toward a bar in the middle of a particularly sordid stretch of real estate that ran north and south for a total of three blocks. There was a time when the Street (as the three-block stretch was familiarly defined) was called the Hussy Hole by the Irish immigrants and later Foxy Way by the blacks. With the Puerto Rican influx, the street had changed its language — but not its major source of income. The Puerto Ricans referred to it as La Vía de Putas. The cops used to call it Whore Street before the word hooker became fashionable. They now referred to it as Hooker Heaven. In any language, you paid your money, and you took your choice.
Not too long a time ago, the madams who ran the sex emporiums called themselves Mama-this or Mama-that. In those days, Mama Teresa’s was the best-known joint on the street. Mama Carmen’s was the filthiest. Mama Luz’s had been raided most often by the cops because of the somewhat exotic things that went on behind its crumbling brick facade. Those days were gone forever. The brothel, as such, was a thing of the past, a quaint memory. Nowadays, the hookers operated out of the massage parlors and bars that lined the street, and turned their tricks in the hotbed hotels that blinked their eyeless neon to the night. The bar Brother Anthony chose was a hooker hangout named Sandy’s, but at 2:00 in the afternoon most of the neighborhood working girls were still sleeping off Friday night’s meaningless exercise. Only a black girl wearing a blonde wig was sitting at the bar.
“Hello, Brother Anthony,” she said. “Hello, Lady.”
“Dominus vobiscum,” Brother Anthony said, cleaving the air with the edge of his right hand in a downward stroke, and then passing the hand horizontally across the first invisible stroke to form the sign of the cross. He had no idea what the Latin words meant. He knew only that they added to the image he had consciously created for himself. “All is image,” he liked to tell Emma, the words rolling mellifluously off his tongue, his voice deep and resonant, “all is illusion.”